(2013-11-22) Balaji Srinivasan Cloud Exit

Balaji Srinivasan anticipates a tech-culture Exit from mainstream BigGov to the Cloud. (Exit Voice And Loyalty, Free State Project)

While our ancestors had America as their ultimate destination, it is not immediately obvious where those seeking opportunity might head today. Every square foot of earth is already spoken for by one (or more) nation states, every physical frontier long since closed. With our bodies hemmed in, our minds have only the cloud — and it is the cloud that has become the destination for an extraordinary mental exodus... This discrepancy between our cloud subculture and our physical surroundings will not endure indefinitely. Because the latest wave of technology is not just connecting us intellectually and emotionally with remote peers: it is also making us ever more mobile, ever more able to meet our peers in person.

Cloud formations are starting to take physical shape in the form of long-term friendly communities that are geographically colocated, like Campus, Embassy Network, and the Rainbow Mansion. In some ways this isn’t anything new — the twin ideas of CoLiving in the same house or CoHousing with separate houses in a shared Community have been around in Denmark since the 1960s and the U.S. since the 1860s. It is simultaneously straightforward and radical to note that when cloud formations take physical shape, neither their scale nor duration has an upper bound. There is no scientific law that prevents 100 people who find each other on the internet from coming together for a month, or 1,000 such people from coming together for a year. And as that increases to 10,000 and 100,000 and beyond, for longer and longer durations, we may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries (Virtual State) materialize out of thin air.

So when it comes to the constraints on mobility imposed by the physical world, the rule is simple: when goods themselves can’t be digitized, our interface to them will be.

Taken together, we are rapidly approaching a future characterized by a totally new phenomenon, the reverse diaspora: one that starts out internationally distributed, finds each other online, and ends up physically concentrated (Off-Line).

He gave a talk on this topic in October at Y-Combinator Startup School: Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. Is the US the Microsoft of Nation-States?

Chart of group size/duration, including potential future structures.

David Brin thinks he forgets/ignores the benefits of democracy: defending individuals and small enterprises from the predatory savagery that the powerful always (and I mean always) used to crush and eliminate competition from those below them. It happened in 99% of generations across 6000 years. Adam Smith knew, described, and denounced the oligarchic-monopolistic attractor state as our worst failure mode (often called feudalism). Brin frames this as the Rapture of the Ingrates. It is called the "NeoReactionary Movement" -- a quasi-new cult that yearns for the ancien régime of monarchy and feudal rule. One that rejects Adam Smith and Ben Franklin and the entire Enlightenment. And above all -- democracy.

• Mencius Moldbug defends the Neo Reactionary position against Democracy: Imagine that revolution is a drug... At what point in history do you approve the drug? After the French Revolution? The Russian? Where, in history, do we see the drug produce its claimed results? Everywhere - from France in 1789, to Russia in 1917, Libya and Syria in 2012 - we see social catastrophe, mass murder, and the most rigid and savage of military despotisms. Historical comparisons are difficult, of course, but when we're talking about a therapy, the first comparison is obvious: the patient before, the patient after. I mean, duh. And yet, the good doctors of philosophy, not giving a shit about Hippocrates (obviously a fag) continue prescribing this medicine. The Enlightenment cannot heal itself. It cannot judge itself. Having given birth to the monster of Jacobinism, it produces this same monster again and again - in the 20th century and even the 21st. It finds a perfectly functional, if hardly perfect, absolute monarchy, and replaces it with chaos and terror and death - the rule of the gun at its most direct and barbaric, the "Turks and Tartars." Then it pats itself on the back. Freedom!